1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, such as a digital still camera, that is provided with a display device including a relatively large display screen and that is capable of displaying various images, and to a method and program used in the apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Digital still cameras that record captured images in recording media as digital data are in widespread use. In recent years, a reduction in size and an increase in capacity of built-in flash memories and removable memories used in the digital still cameras are promoted, so that a large amount of image data can be stored in these memories.
In the digital still cameras, the number of stored images that are captured is increased with the increasing number of years and image data items of a number that is unmanageable by users are often stored in the built-in flash memories and the removable memories.
In such situations, users add keywords to image data to allow search using the keywords in some digital still cameras. For example, a variety of information including places where image data is captured and the names of persons in the images is add to the captured image data as keywords.
In search for the image data item corresponding to a desired image from image data items by using the keywords added to the image data items, users set (instruct) search keys to perform the search.
For example, an appropriate search key is selected from search keys that are presented in advance to set the selected search key, or text data that is input by a user is received to set the received text data as a search key. Then, the search can be performed by using the set search key to narrow image data down to the image data having the set search key.
As described above, adding keywords to image data allows the search of the image data by using the keywords, thus achieving flexible search for the image data.
A variety of improvement is achieved in the image search using keywords. For example, technologies to allow rapid and precise search for desired images are disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-354134 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-165424.